I had my own private mission to be able to live without Windows. Doesn’t pay to be OS dependant when the world is ever changing and technology is changing at a phenomenal speed. So I blogged the day I had achieved that goal. I run Wine on Ubuntu and my Apple Mac so I can use Windows applications and access my Windows drive. Oddly enough it is a rare occurrence and these days I use Windows when I want to, but still, there are times when I want things which are saved under Windows or normally run under Windows. I really think applications need to be multi platform and a lot of them are these days. On the Mac you just download an install Wine and it’s pretty straightforward from there. Ubuntu takes a little more time but is quite easy. This YouTube video shows you step by step how to install Wine and use it on Ubuntu.
Photofiltre for Windows is a cut above the easy photo software I blogged about yesterday and thanks to my friend Mireille in France I now know about Photofiltre which runs in several languages and is free. I have just installed it on my MacBook using Wine and as you can see it is working fine. I am assuming I shall be able to use it on Ubuntu too since I have installed Wine on there as well. On my MacBook I tried Winebottler first but it couldn’t convert it to a Mac app. Never mind. Photofiltre is really good because it does have some nice image filters to dress up your images and you can arrange a batch process so you can modify a number of images in one go. I like the lake mirror filter. That appeals to me greatly but I am Pisces.! Photofiltre is designed for Windows but Wine takes the worry out of accessing good applications when you are working on other OSs.
Are you like me? Most of the time I just want a paint / graphics programme to resize images or crop them. I don’t need to be doing fancy things most of the time which is why I don’t teach media or art. I just want to puddle with images. On Windows I use Paint from the Accessories folder and then I have downloaded Paint.net which is a lovely little programme. For more complex things I have graphics programmes which have come with my digital cameras. On Ubuntu I use Gimp when I want to do something complex but the easiest paint programme for Ubuntu is mtPaint graphic editor. So easy and does everything I want. On the Apple Mac I use Adobe Photoshop or Gimp for more complex things but the easiest paint programme is Paintbrush. You can preset the image size and the format you want your images saved in. Doesn’t get easier than that. If I want to quickly do an artistic layout of images on the Mac or Windows, then I use Shape Collage which makes me look really good!
The downloads section of the Apple site just keeps improving with what it has to offer to help you make your Mac look more interesting. Macs do have good graphics capabilities so it is good that Apple is actually encouraging users to make use of this strength. Here you can find icon packages and screen savers. Some are just fun but some have good educational value.
I wrote about FluidApp and how that can be used to turn any web site into a Dock icon which helps to streamline your Mac Desktop. The other thing you need to do is customise Finder because it is actually very handy and will help you to locate what you need. If you make Dock apps from frequently used websites and then store other items in Finder it is much easier to go about your tasks. A lot of people migrating from Windows or swapping from Windows to Mac on a regular basis get to the Apple desktop and then cannot find things. That is what Finder is for. This post explains it in detail, with pictures, and extremely well. You understand why you should be making the changes and what benefit they are to you and then you can see how to make the changes.
E-WOT 